


Honeymoon

by sarahxxxlovey



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Betty Cooper Loves Jughead Jones, Bruises, Bughead Smut, Character Analysis, Consensual Kink, Consensual Sex, F/M, Jughead Jones Loves Betty Cooper, Jughead Jones is Not Asexual, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Wedding, Light BDSM, Pining Jughead Jones, Sexual Content, Teen Romance, Teenage Marriage, all characters are adults, in this fic - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 15:44:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15844383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahxxxlovey/pseuds/sarahxxxlovey
Summary: 'It’s the week after her eighteenth birthday and they leave on a Friday. She says she’s going to Veronica’s and her mom believes her. He has no one who cares enough to be lied to.'Inspired by 'Honeymoon' by Lana Del Rey.





	Honeymoon

**Author's Note:**

> This is definitely something a tiny bit different - although very much in line. I went for more of a lyrical, poetic type of thing.

It’s the week after her eighteenth birthday and they leave on a Friday. She says she’s going to Veronica’s and her mom believes her.

He has no one who cares enough to be lied to.

“Got your ID?” he asks as she opens the car door. She plants a big kiss on his lips.

“Yup,” she replies, bouncing giddily in her seat as she buckles her seat belt and he pulls away from the curb, tires screeching along the perfectly kept pavement.

It’s impossibly hot outside, humid and stifling and the air conditioning in his dad’s truck barely works and so they settle for having the air conditioning on while also having the windows all the way down. She knows that it’ll be even hotter where they’re going, but it’s supposed to be a dry heat and there’ll be a pool and it’ll all be worth it in the end.

They share a duffle bag, her old cheer bag actually, and it gets thrown in the backseat on top of crumpled receipts and empty bottles of water, twisted and mangled from the heat and the cold of the changing seasons they’ve endured on the floor in the backseat. Jughead wears the sneakers on his feet and brings his boots just in case and Betty can tell he’s nervous and excited just like she is, so anxiously anticipatory that she feels like she might throw up.

Her stomach knots. Her palms sweat and she realizes she’s excited. It’s so taboo that she can barely think straight, dizzy with the possibility of the future, the weight of everything that they’re doing. Heal pools in her against the seat beneath her.

She had packed away lipstick tubes of Seduce Scarlet and Pink Perfection and wonders which one she’ll wear over the weekend, the conflicting parts of her personality vying for attention, the black and the baby pink lingerie both in the plastic bag shoved at the bottom wondering the same thing - which Betty will she be? Which Betty is more her?

Will her hair be blonde or black on that night?

The road opens up and it’s flat for hundreds and hundreds of miles and it feels even longer and they go through every single car game they can think of with their two brains together. I Spy, Contact, the License Plate Game, 20 questions. Each round gets sillier and sillier and by the end she feels like she’s going to pee her pants, laughing hysterically and rolling around in her seat, feet up on the dashboard and hands clutching at her aching stomach muscles.

They stop at a pawn shop half way across the country, one that she uses her phone to find that looks like it’s in a decent neighborhood, and they pick out matching gold bands, laughing giddily as they walk out with the rings on their right hands, still in partial disbelief that this was really happening, and that it was happening this weekend.

She can’t stop looking down at it, the simple piece of metal on her finger and wonders what it’ll look like on the other hand.

Back in the car, she watches him as he drives, some 90s grunge rock tape in the old stereo system and his fingers tapping on the steering wheel in time with the beat. She looks at the scars on his knuckles and on the top of his cheekbones. She knows him well enough to know where most of them came from.

Childhood accidents.

The gauntlet.

The Ghoulies.

She can follow some of the scars from their space on his neck and forearms to the space that they occup beneath his shirt; she can picture the next one that comes up below.

The faint lines, some darker and some lighter reflecting how deeply they hurt both her and him when they occured. She has to distract herself from the pit in her stomach at the thought of some of those moments, some of the darkest in their lives, their journeys coming together in a twist of fate.

A physical reminder of his past and his present and his future. She knows every inch of his body, every millimeter of scar tissue and how each and every scar came to live on his skin, where the shadows underneath his eyes came from.

She knows the history of violence that surrounds him and even still, she loves him, she loves him, she loves him.

His leather jacket lies across the seats behind them and she glances back at it, the ever present reminder in their lives of times when she feared for the worst, a million moments when things could have gone horribly wrong, when any breath could have been the last one.

She takes a sip of lukewarm water out of a gas station water bottle and stops her thoughts in their tracks, rubbing at ghost pains in her palms.

He’s a true vision in the light as the sun sets behind the hills. Round sunglasses covering his eyes and a white wife beater, a name that she hates but she has yet to come up with a different word for it.

She tries not to think of what their friends and family will think. She wonders how she’ll tell them, how long before she and Jughead decided that it isn’t just their secret anymore. Weeks? Months? Years? They’ll be surprised, maybe disappointed. She doesn’t care.

He’s sweating, just like she is, all the way from the hairs at the back of her neck to the bend behind her knees. It’s hot and sticky in the car and she wishes it would rain like the clouds they passed under hinted at, but it didn’t. It stayed hot and sticky and as she continued to look at him drive, gold band shining on his right hand, she felt hot and sticky too, anxious to get to their destination.

She knows that Veronica has called him Riverdale’s own Holden Caulfield, sneaking off into the corner to write and drink coffee and be the human version of a rain cloud, but he’s not just like that to Betty; the more she knows him, his soul and his mind and his body, the more she knows his layers. He lives in a trailer and it’s hard to romanticize that, the lack of reliable heating in the winter and the way that whole house rocks a little bit when it’s especially windy, how the rain keeps them up all night as they try to sleep. There have been many nights when he snuck up into her bedroom up the ladder to cuddle in her in her 800 count Egyptian cotton sheets, her house holding to a perfect 72 degrees as it blizzarded outside.

But even so, the trailer a place to escape to, a place for _them_ to escape to. The place that he whispered that he loved her, softly and nervously. Where she gave herself to him entirely that first time as he slowly unzipped her pastel pink dress, where she got on top of him, where she rubbed onto him desperately, where they whispered about the future into the early hours of the morning.

She thinks everyone would love him if they knew him like she did, but reputations precede people in most cases and those people don’t even know the whole truth, the true tragedy that haunts his life.

If they knew, they’d only judge more.

The homelessness, the neglect, the abandonment, the way that she gently took all of his firsts and he took all of hers, their mutual giving of innocence. Everything about him simultaneously screams cool and uncool. The Serpents tattoo and his flannels, the way that he was forced into a life he didn’t want by his desire for safety, the way that his style was shaped by the fact that he could always find checkered prints in decent shape at the thrift store. The beanie, a trademark and also a symbol of how he didn’t want to let the world in. His safety blanket.

He lives in a trailer and everything about him screams cool and uncool. No letterman’s jacket. A leather jacket with a gang symbol on the back instead. No musical talent, but a dark mind and a knack for making people feel deeply with every word he writes. She could compare him to Archie in a million ways and the childhood feelings she had for her neighbor pale in comparison to how she feels for the man sitting next to her in the front seat of his car.

He isn’t cool Just like she isn’t cool either, their fucked up families and the issues that come up late at night as they’re falling asleep, the nightmares that pull them from slumber to the realities of their pasts.

The scars on his knuckles and the moon-shaped marks on her palms. When she puts her hand over his on the gear shift, they overlap.

Sweat drips down from his brown and he wipes lazily at it, fiddling with the air vent on the dashboard until he gives up and leans his elbow against where the window should be, his head resting on his hand. She wonders if he knows how good his arms look right now.

He’s an elusive mystery to everyone but her, his beanie and his scars and his writing and his hatred of social events and his snarky comebacks.

A part of the Serpents, dark and dangerous, but also the sunshine that woke her up in the morning, steaming in gently through her closed eyelids, pulling her to consciousness with lazy rays. He’s tough and gritty on the outside and on the inside he’s a puppy dog, walking to the gas station to buy her chocolate, brushing the hair gently away from her face, desperate for her approval and attention, desperate for slices of control and slices of normal in his life.

He had fought and been fought, just like she had too, by their parents, their friends, the enemies that be. They were both lost and had both been found in those quiet moments together. He had always been a lover and a fighter deep down in there somewhere. They brought out both sides of each other.

Sometimes she feels like she can’t find him through the layers of leather and self-protection, his true soul buried deep below but then he blooms and opens up and surprises her and she falls in love with him all over again.

He’s fire in her heart, in her loins. The light and the darkness of her life. If she hadn’t seen so much life and tragedy in her short time on earth, if she believed in red strings and gods and fates, in destiny and how the world moved to bring to lovers together, she might believe that they were brought together for a reason, like magnets so strong it was useless to try to keep them apart. Like a lock and a key, both useless without the other.

There was no one for him but her, she had decided. Nobody who could match his darkness like she did, nobody that knew him inside and out like she did. Nobody who could match her darkness and accepted it as a part that should be revered, respected, reconciled with. They’d never go anywhere because truly, there was nobody for them but each other.

She loves him with every beat of her heart.

He drives through the night and lets her sleep in the back seat, pushing everything to the floor so she can lay down against the torn fabric, using her denim jacket as a pillow.

He holds gas station coffee in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, the stereo playing blues now, the rough voices of John Lee Hooker and BB King singing her to sleep as the car rocks back and forth over the plains of Middle America. He’s humming along gently and she thinks it must be the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard, his tired voice gravely as they drive to where no one knows them.

He shakes her away when they pass through the third to last state in the morning. They go to the vending machines at the rest stop and she can’t stop herself from having ice cream for breakfast on a weekend like this. If not now, when? The world was her oyster.

She can hear her mom's voice in the back of her head and she ignores it, gleefully taking a big bite out of her drumstick as Jughead eats an ice cream sandwich, calling her a heathen.

“No really, Betts,” he says, “Who _bites_ ice cream?”  

She sits in the front seat again, pink toenails looking up at her as she rests her feet on the dashboard, eating the bag of chips they bought with quarters found underneath the truck seats.

They switch back and forth driving at Betty’s insistence, the heat dying down as another day passes and another night comes, the earth taking a sigh of relief as the desert chilled and it feels like sinking into a comfortable couch after a long day of work, the pressure lifting from her temples and her chest.

Her phone chirps at her that they’re getting off the highway, and finally, finally they’re here.

They check into their hotel and it looks like something straight from the 60s. They lay down excitedly on the bed and whisper until the tall hours of the night.

He sets his cell phone alarm for six am so they can go to the courthouse early. She stands nervously on the linoleum next to him, her hand in his, and the world melts away when he gives her a reassuring smile and kisses her gently.

She holds the piece of paper in her hand and when she smiles at him, his eyes light up and he kisses her hard and fast.

She lounges by the pool while he picks up donuts and they eat them by the pool, dipping in as the sun rises across the chlorinated water and she watches the patterns that the ripples make on the bottom of the pool.

* * *

He puts on a black shirt and a black tie and black pants and a bolo he found in the pawn shop with the rings that the worker threw in for free and he wears his same black sneakers. She whispers teasingly that he looks like Johnny Cash. He growls and nips at her ear as she stands in front of the bathroom mirror.

She dusts ballerina pink blush on the apples of her cheeks, coats her lashes with dark mascara, and slips into a dress that she found at the mall. It skims at her calves and is colored virginal white and the irony isn’t lost on her, the black lace peeking out at her from the duffel bag on the chair in the other room.

She wonders if she’ll tell their children, grandchildren this story. Standing in a hotel bathroom, abandoning tradition in too many ways to count, the way that the love she has for him at this time in her life overwhelms her. She wonders if they’ll be able to see it, how much she loves him and how much he loves her too.

She curls her hair and gently brushes it out, pulling a few strands off her face and tucking them back with a pin, slipping her feet into a pair of heels, the ones she wore to prom. Looking in the mirror, an adult is staring back at her. The dress is grown up and a little 60’s and it’s exactly what she wanted, everything she dreamed of.

He calls a car and they stand by the crummy hotel lobby waiting for it, nervously holding hands. She feels like giggling and throwing up.

When they get there he goes in before him and swelling music plays in the background as she tugs her dress down and the top up, shifting her weight nervously between her feet. She adjusts the bouquet of white roses and daisies in her hands and when the doors open, the way Jughead looks at her makes her feel like a rose, a daisy in her own right.

She walks down the aisle alone and when she meets him at the altar of the tiny chapel on the outskirts of the city where things are supposed to stay, his eyes are filled with tears and hers match before she can think a thought of it. The city where things are supposed to stay but this is one thing that will follow them back to Riverdale and the thought makes their hearts pound a little harder, the permanence of their decision.

The sniffs her way through the vows, traditional and comforting in a way, the weight of the words heavy on her as their eyes stay connected while he says his too. She can hear the tears at the back of his words, the way he’s barely controlling his emotion behind a layer of dark hair and dark clothes.

The officiant speaks and then the moment comes.

The girl next door and Mr. Born to Lose become one in Sin City.

She wraps her arms around his neck and he lifts her off her feet.

Sealed with a kiss.

The sun is setting and in true fashion, they sit in a booth at a diner that feels eerily similar to Pop’s.

He slips his leather jacket around her shoulders and they feed each other french fries and steal sips of each others shakes. She thinks absentmindedly that she has her baby blue shoes and her shiny new ring and his old, borrowed jacket.

She looks at him to find he’s already looking at her and she reaches her arm across the table to grab his hand.

“I love you, Mrs. Cooper-Jones,” he says seriously, kissing the bones on her knuckles.

She heats at her core and whispers that she loves him too.

An hour later, he picks her up and carries her across the altar of their cheap motel room.

Archie got them champagne for the trip before they left and they pop it, giggling and sparkling as they take back and forth sips from the overflowing bottle. It’s decadence again, like cross country road trips and ice cream for breakfast and mid-afternoon sex.

As the champagne hits her system slowly, she pushes back the thoughts of the guns waiting for him at home, duffel bags and foreboding responsibilities and debts, all still there in the sleepy town of Riverdale, focusing on the way that he’s kissing her neck, the way that his presence makes her a little dizzy, the alcohol thudding gently behind the pulse of her wrists.

She lays back on the bed, spreading her legs, and he settles between them, his leather jacket long pushed off of his shoulders, the sleeves of his black dress shirt rolled up around his elbows and even looking at the veins in his arms makes her wetter. She opens her thighs and reveals the roses there, the rough love bites and opened mouth kisses he left against the skin of her thighs, the night before. The flowers are blooming red and purple and blue against the fairness of her skin and she knows the sight makes him hard for her.

He likes making her his, pushing her limits and saving her from herself. The way that they love each other is reckless. All-consuming.

She gasps as he pulls her hair back harshly to expose her neck, biting at the skin there. She clutches at the bottom of his shirt, tugging impatiently at the fabric.

 _Off, off, off,_ she breathes.

He starts on it and it feels like one step closer to heaven, unbuttoning each button, running her hands under the shirt and pushing it down off of his shoulders.

She has a lingering thought in the back of her head that she should dress up for him, primp and preen for his eyes. It is their wedding night after all. But the thought is gone as he unzips the back of her dress and tugs it down over her chest, kissing at the peaks of her breasts and grinding himself against her core.

Without thinking her hands go up to clutch at the slats in the headboard, rolling her hips up into him.

“Fuck, Betts,” he growls and her pleasure coils inside of her, the way he breathes her name.

He sinks into her easily and she wraps her legs around him, pulling him towards her. He sinks deeper and they sigh simultaneously, feeling a complete wholeness that they yearn for.

They move together like two beatings of the same heart, plucking the same string, the unspoken connection between them pulsing. He pulls and she gives in, she pushes and he receives. She wants to give him everything.

It’s over quickly and she doesn’t mind and even during, it’s a blur of movement and emotion. They can’t stop saying I love you. She can feel every one of his emotions and all the feelings that he has for her curls inside of her, pulsing, warm like him inside of her, pushing her over the edge and she falls and falls and falls, coming to the peak before she really knows what’s happening.

She’s unattached at this point, barely feeling the hand around her neck, the way his hand grips at the sensitive skin at her hip bones, the tug on her hair and the pinch of her nipple. She’s floating and she wonders if all people experience this, the way that she can feel their hearts beating together, closer than she’s ever felt to him. She barely feels her body and yet she feels everything.

The earth shatters and he’s kissing her through it, grounding each of the two of them with the other, pressing her into the mattress with a sigh.

He kisses her gently and rolls her on top of him, draped in a way that she hopes he finds attractive, but she’s barely able to function through the sedation of multiple orgasms and the emotion of the day.

Her thoughts float restlessly and lazily back to the way that she pictured her life would be. Better but so different that it shakes her insides a little bit. No Archie Andrews in a three piece suit in a church and then a hotel ballroom. No Polly standing as her maid of honor, Alice sitting in the front row wiping tasteful tears with an antique handkerchief.

She realizes that Jughead probably never had elaborate fantasies like this in his head. Their brains think different and for that, she’s thankful. Thankful that he pulls her back to what she actually wants, not what she’s been pressured into thinking is her own thoughts.

Later, she slips into something a little more comfortable, black lace criss-crossing against her breasts and stomach. She leaves the black wig in their duffel but puts her hair up in a ponytail and it feels fully like her, blonde and black and bruised all over. He’s hard again in seconds and he’s softer towards her this time despite her dressing, kissing in between her thighs and sucking and licking until she cums and cums and cums against his tongue. He brings her back down and then up again, up and up and when she falls, he catches her.

In the early of the morning, talking as they often find themselves doing, he tells her how unbelievable it is that he’s wearing this ring on his finger, that hers matches, how he got the girl after thinking about moments like these for years. He tells her his personal vows softly, to protect her, to push her to love herself and be healthy, how he'll love her until he dies, always, always, always. He kisses her palms and again, she thinks of the scars that they both have, how they line up when she puts her hand over his, and so she does.

He smiles gently and kisses her with searing emotion, pushing her back onto the bed one last time as the day warms.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to push the limits a little bit. I’m incredibly inspired by Lana Del Rey and found her music fit perfectly, this story erupting in my heart before I could stop it. I also find myself incredibly drawn to more poetic structure, character analysis, very loosely following a barely-there plot. Anyhoo, let me know what you think. x


End file.
